I sit with my back against the tree and reach into my backpack, feeling past my geometry textbook to my spiral notebook, thinking I’ll feel better if I work on a poem first, but when I open to my latest one, a couple of stanzas about a girl trapped on an island who calls sailors to shore, I read over the lines and realize they’re bad—clumsy, disjointed, practically incoherent. And I thought these lines were good. How did I think they were good? They’re blatantly bad. Probably all my poems are bad. I curl into myself and grind the heels of my hands against my eyelids until I hear footsteps approach, crunching leaves and cracking twigs. I look up and a towering silhouette blocks out the sun.
“Hello there,” it says.
I shield my eyes—Mr. Strane. His expression changes when he notices my face, my red-rimmed eyes. “You’re upset,” he says.
Gazing up at him, I nod. There doesn’t seem to be any use in lying.
“Would you rather be left alone?” he asks.
I hesitate, then shake my head no.
He lowers himself to the ground beside me, leaving a few feet between us. His long legs are stretched out, the outline of his knees visible beneath his trousers. He keeps his eyes on me, watches as I wipe my eyes.
“I didn’t mean to impose. I spied you from the window there, thought I’d say hello.” He points behind us, to the humanities building. “Can I ask what’s upsetting you?”
I take a breath, try to work out the words, but after a moment I shake my head. “It’s too big to explain,” I say. Because it’s about more than my poem being bad, or that I can’t pick a study spot without exhausting myself. It’s a darker feeling, a fear of there being something wrong with me that I won’t ever be able to fix.
I expect Mr. Strane to let it go at that. Instead, he waits the same way he’d wait in class for a response to a tough question. Of course it seems too big to explain, Vanessa. That’s how hard questions are meant to make you feel.
Taking a breath, I say, “This time of year just makes me feel nuts. Like I’m running out of time or something. Like I’m wasting my life.”
Mr. Strane blinks. I can tell this isn’t what he expected me to say. “Wasting your life,” he echoes.
“I know that doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it does. It makes perfect sense.” He leans back on his hands, tilts his head. “You know, if you were my age, I’d say it sounds like you’re in the beginning of a midlife crisis.”
He smiles and, without meaning to, my face mirrors him. He grins, I grin.
“It looked like you were writing,” he says. “Were you getting good work done?”
I lift my shoulders, unsure if I want to call my writing good. It seems boastful, not for me to say.
“Would you show me what you’ve written?”
“No way.” I clutch my notebook in my hands, hold it closer to my chest, and in his eyes I see a flash of alarm, like my sudden movement has scared him. I steady myself and add, “It’s just not finished.”
“Is writing ever really finished?”
That feels like a trick question. I think for a moment, then say, “Some writing can be more finished than other writing.”
He smiles; he likes that. “Do you have something more finished you can show me?”
I loosen my grip and open the notebook’s front cover. It’s full of mostly half-finished poems, lines scrawled out and rewritten. I thumb through recent pages to find the one I’ve been working on for a couple weeks. It isn’t finished, but it isn’t terrible. I hand him the notebook, hoping he won’t notice the doodles in the margins, the flowering vine crawling along the spine.
He holds the notebook carefully in both hands, and just seeing that, my notebook in his hands, sends a jolt through me. No one else has ever touched my notebook before, let alone read anything in it. At the end of the poem, he says, “Huh.” I wait for a clearer reaction, for him to let me know if he thinks it’s good or not, but he only says, “I’m going to read it again.”
When he finally looks up and says, “Vanessa, this is lovely,” I exhale so loudly, I laugh. “How long did you work on this?” he asks.
Thinking it’s more impressive to come across as an instantaneous genius, I shrug out a lie. “Not long.”
“You said you write often.” He hands the notebook back to me.
“Every day, usually.”
“It shows. You’re very good. I say that as a reader, not a teacher.”
I’m so delighted, I laugh again, and Mr. Strane smiles his tender-condescending smile. “Is that funny?” he asks.
“No, that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.”
“You’re kidding. That’s nothing. I could say much nicer things.”
“It’s just I never really let anyone read my . . .” I almost say stuff but instead try out the word he used. “My work.”
A silence settles between us. He leans back on his hands and studies the view: the picturesque downtown, distant river, and rolling hills. I look back to my notebook, eyes turned down at its pages but seeing nothing. I’m too aware of his body next to mine, his sloping torso and stomach straining against his shirt, long legs crossed at the ankle, how one of his pant legs has bunched up, revealing a half inch of skin above his hiking boot. Worried he might get up and leave, I try to think of something to say to keep him here, but before I can, he plucks a fallen red maple leaf off the ground, spins it by its stem, considers it for a moment, and then holds it up to my face.
“Look at that,” he says. “It matches your hair perfectly.”
I freeze, feel my mouth fall open. He holds the maple leaf there a beat longer, its points brushing against my hair. Then, shaking his head a little, he drops his hand and the leaf falls to the ground. He stands—again blocking out the sun—wipes his hands on his thighs, and walks back to the humanities building without saying goodbye.
When he disappears, a mania seizes me, a need to flee. I snap my notebook shut, grab my backpack, and start off toward the dorm, but then think better and double back to scan the ground for the exact leaf he held up to my hair. Once it’s safe, tucked between the pages of my notebook, I move across campus as though airborne, barely making contact with the earth between strides. It isn’t until I’m back in my room that I remember he said he saw me from his window, and I squeeze my eyes shut against the thought of him back in the classroom, watching me search for the leaf.
I go home the next weekend for Dad’s birthday. Mom’s gift to him is a yellow Labrador puppy from the shelter, the reason for owner surrender listed as “pigment too pale.” Dad names the puppy Babe, after the pig movie, because she looks like a piglet with her fat belly and pink nose. Our last dog died over the summer, a twelve-year-old shepherd Dad found as a stray in town, so we’ve never had a puppy before, and I fall in love so hard I carry her around all weekend like a baby, rubbing her jelly-bean paw pads and smelling her sweet breath.
At night after my parents go to bed, I stand in front of my bedroom mirror, study my face and hair and try to see myself as Mr. Strane sees me, a girl with maple-red hair who wears nice dresses and has good style, but I can’t get past the sight of myself as a pale, freckled child.
When Mom and I drive back to Browick, Dad stays home with Babe, and in the closed-off space of the car, my chest burns from wanting to tell. But what is there to tell? He touched my hand a couple times, said something about my hair?
As we drive across the bridge into town, I ask in my most casual voice, “Have you ever noticed my hair is the color of maple leaves?”
Mom looks over at me, surprised. “Well, there are different kinds of maple,” she says, “and they all turn different colors in the fall. There’s sugar, there’s striped, there’s red. And depending how north you are, there’s mountain maple—”
“Never mind. Forget it.”
“Since when are you interested in trees?”
“I was talking about my hair, not trees.”
She asks who told me my hair
looked like maple leaves, but she doesn’t sound suspicious. Her voice is soft, like she thinks it’s sweet.
“No one,” I say.
“Someone must have said it to you.”
“I can’t notice something like that about myself?”
We stop at a red light. On the radio, a voice reads the top-of-the-hour news headlines.
“If I tell you,” I say, “you have to promise not to overreact.”
“I would never.”
I give her a long look. “Promise.”
“All right,” she says. “I promise.”
I take a breath. “A teacher said it to me. That my hair is the color of red maple leaves.” There’s a giddy relief as I say the words; I nearly let out a laugh.
Mom narrows her eyes. “A teacher?” she asks.
“Mom, watch the road.”
“Was it a man?”
“What does it matter?”
“A teacher shouldn’t be saying that to you. Who was it?”
“Mom.”
“I want to know.”
“You promised you wouldn’t overreact.”
She presses her lips together, as though to calm herself. “It’s a strange thing to tell a fifteen-year-old girl, that’s all I’m saying.”
We drive through town: blocks of Victorian mansions fallen into disrepair and broken up into apartments, the empty downtown, the sprawling hospital, the grinning Paul Bunyan statue who, with his black hair and beard, looks a little like Mr. Strane.
“It was a man,” I say. “You really think it’s weird?”
“Yes,” Mom says. “I really do. Do you want me to talk to someone? I’ll go in there and cause a scene.”
I picture her storming into the administration building, demanding to talk to the headmaster. I shake my head. No, I don’t want that. “It was just a random thing he said,” I say. “It really wasn’t a big deal.”
With that, Mom relaxes a little. “Who was it?” she asks again. “I won’t do anything. I just want to know.”
“My politics teacher.” I don’t even hesitate in the lie. “Mr. Sheldon.”
“Mr. Sheldon.” She spits it out like it’s the stupidest name she’s ever heard. “You shouldn’t be hanging out with teachers anyway. Focus on making friends.”
I watch the road pass by. We could take the interstate to Browick, but Mom refuses, says it’s a racetrack full of angry people. She drives a two-lane highway instead that takes twice as long.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, you know.”
She glances over, her brow furrowed.
“I prefer to be by myself. It’s normal. You shouldn’t give me such a hard time about it.”
“I’m not giving you a hard time,” she says, but we both know that’s not true. After a moment, she adds, “I’m sorry. I just worry about you.”
We hardly talk for the rest of the drive, and as I stare out the window, I can’t help but feel like I’ve won.
I’m sitting at a study carrel in the library, geometry homework spread out before me. I’m trying to concentrate, but my brain feels like a rock skipping over water. Or, no—like a rock rattling around in a tin can. I take out my notebook to jot down the line and get distracted by the island girl poem I’m still working on. When I next look up, an hour has passed, and my geometry homework is still untouched.
I rub my face, pick up my pencil, and try to work, but within minutes I’m gazing out the window. It’s the golden hour, light setting the fiery trees ablaze. Boys in soccer jerseys with cleats slung over their shoulders head back from the fields. Two girls carry violin cases like backpacks, their twin ponytails swinging with each step.
Then I see Ms. Thompson and Mr. Strane walking together toward the humanities building. They move slowly, taking their time, Mr. Strane with his hands clasped behind his back and Ms. Thompson smiling, touching her face. I try to remember if I’ve seen them together before, try to decide if Ms. Thompson is pretty. She has blue eyes and black hair, a combination my mother always calls striking, but she’s chubby and her butt sticks out like a shelf. It’s the sort of body I’m afraid I’ll grow up to have if I’m not careful.
I squint across the distance to gather more details. They’re close but not touching. At one point, Ms. Thompson tips her head back and laughs. Is Mr. Strane funny? He hasn’t ever made me laugh. Pressing my face against the window, I try to keep them in my sight, but they round a corner and disappear behind the orange leaves of an oak tree.
We take PSATs and I do ok but not as well as most other sophomores, who start receiving Ivy League brochures in their mailboxes. I buy another day planner to help with my organization, which gets noticed by my teachers and passed on to Mrs. Antonova, who gives me a tin of hazelnut candies for a job well done.
In English we read Walt Whitman and Mr. Strane talks about the idea that people contain multitudes and contradictions. I begin to pay attention to the ways he seems to contradict himself, how he went to Harvard but tells stories about growing up poor, the way he sprinkles eloquent speech with obscenities and pairs tailored blazers and ironed shirts with scuffed hiking boots. His teaching style is contradictory, too. Speaking up in class always feels risky, because if he likes what you say, he’ll clap and bound over to the chalkboard to elaborate on the brilliant comment you made, but if he doesn’t like it, he won’t even let you finish—he cuts you off with an “Ok, that’s enough” that slices to the bone. It makes me scared to talk even though sometimes after he asks the class an open-ended question, he’ll stare straight at me, like he wants to know specifically what I have to say.
In the margins of my class notes, I keep track of the details he lets slip about himself: he grew up in Butte, Montana, pronounced like cute; before going to Harvard at eighteen, he’d never seen the ocean; he lives in downtown Norumbega, across from the public library; he doesn’t like dogs, was mauled by one as a boy. One Tuesday after creative writing club, when Jesse is already out the door and halfway down the hall, Mr. Strane says he has something for me. He opens the bottom drawer of his desk and takes out a book.
“Is this for class?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “It’s for you.” He walks around the desk, puts the book in my hands: Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. “Have you read her?”
I shake my head, turn the book over. It’s worn, with a blue cloth cover. A scrap of paper sticks out between the pages as a makeshift bookmark.
“She’s a bit overdone,” Mr. Strane says. “But young women love her.”
I don’t know what he means by “overdone” but don’t want to ask. I flip through the book—flashes of poems—and stop at the bookmarked page; the title “Lady Lazarus” is capitalized in bold. “Why is this one marked?” I ask.
“Let me show you.”
Mr. Strane comes up beside me, turns the page. Standing so close to him feels like being swallowed; my head doesn’t reach his shoulder.
“Here.” He points to the lines:
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
He says, “That reminded me of you.” Then he reaches behind me and tugs on my ponytail.
I stare at the book as though I’m studying the poem, but the stanzas blur to black smears on a yellow page. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in response. It feels like I should laugh. I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.
In a quiet voice, Mr. Strane asks, “Is it ok that it reminded me of you?”
I lick my lips, lift my shoulders. “Sure.”
“Because the last thing I want is to overstep.”
Overstep. I’m not sure what he means by that, either, but the way he gazes down at me stops me from asking any questions. He suddenly seems both embarrassed and hopeful, like if I told him this wasn’t ok, he might start to cry.
So I smile, shake my head. “You’re not.”
He exhales. “Good,” he says, moving aw
ay from me, back to his desk. “Give it a read and let me know what you think. Maybe you’ll be inspired to write a poem or two.”
I leave the classroom and go straight to Gould, where I get into bed and read Ariel all the way through. I like the poems, but I’m more interested in figuring out why they reminded him of me and when this reminding might’ve happened—the afternoon with the leaf, maybe? Maple-red hair. I wonder how long he had this book in his desk drawer, if he waited awhile to decide whether to give it to me. Maybe he had to work up the courage.
I take the scrap of paper he used to mark “Lady Lazarus” and write in neat cursive, I rise with my red hair, then pin it to the corkboard above my desk. Adults are the only ones who ever say anything nice about my hair, but this is more than him being nice. He thinks about me. He thinks about me so much, certain things remind him of me. That means something.
I wait a few days before I return Ariel, dawdling at the end of class until everyone else leaves and then sliding the book onto his desk.
“Well?” He leans forward on his elbows, eager to hear what I have to say.
I hesitate, scrunch my nose. “She’s kind of self-absorbed.”
He laughs at that—a real laugh. “That’s fair. And I appreciate your honesty.”
“But I liked it,” I say. “Especially the one you marked.”
“I thought you would.” He steps over to the built-in bookcases, scans the shelves. “Here,” he says, handing me another book—Emily Dickinson. “Let’s see what you think of this.”
I don’t wait to give him back the Dickinson. The next day after class, I drop the book onto his desk and say, “Not a fan.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was kind of boring.”
“Boring!” He presses his palm over his chest. “Vanessa, you’re breaking my heart.”
“You said you appreciated my honesty,” I say with a laugh.
“I do,” he says. “I just appreciate it more when I’m in agreement with it.”
The next book he gives me is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who is, according to Mr. Strane, the furthest thing from boring. “And she was a red-haired girl from Maine,” he says, “just like you.”
My Dark Vanessa Page 4